


Storm On His Skin

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Lazy Mornings, M/M, Morning After, Rain, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-28 00:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15696228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: A rainy day of lazy thoughts leads to recollections. The scars Noct can see on him have hurt and left worse ones in Nyx's head. But for every jagged mark, there's a softer story to lessen the sting. And coffee cooling on the windowsill.





	Storm On His Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glaivenoct](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glaivenoct/gifts).



> filled for a prompt [over here](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/177036645802/pssst-rainy-day-ask-meme-dont-leave-the)

“Don’t leave the covers, it’s cold and raining out and I need your warmth.”

Nyx could barely understand the indignant little command, muffled underneath the covers. A pale hand braved the chill to venture from beneath the knotted sheets, pawing blindly across the bed for him. Nyx pressed his lips together to contain the little bubble of laughter which threatened to escape him at the sight. He didn’t want to give himself away just yet – make his sleeping beauty wake himself up for once.

When his order was not fulfilled with the immediacy in which he expected it, Noct’s face finally rose from his bunker of bedsheets, bleary-eyed and blank, save for a small crease of frustration in the middle of his forehead. Nyx’s new sweater hung askew across his slim shoulders, the dark blue fabric commandeered by his little thief in the middle of the night – which was fine; Nyx had really bought the thing for Noct – most of his clothes ended up on him, anyway.

Noctis rubbed the end of an overlong sleeve against the side of his face he’d slept on, trying to loosen the eye from its plaster of sleep to help him find Nyx across the room.

“What are you doing all the way over there?” he mumbled once he found him, squinting from the one eye he could get working. “Your Prince is hypothermic, aren’t you sworn to, like, do something about that?”

Nyx snorted, just barely controlling himself from doubling over laughing. Instead, he shook his head and raised the two mugs of coffee in his hands. “Will this ‘something’ do?”

Noctis affected a critical look over the offering, his dazed stare going out of focus to better survey the bare sampling of skin carrying it more than anything else. Nyx grinned, gratified by the admiration this early in the morning, when the most Noctis could usually manage was an assortment of half-open glares and incomprehensible grunts.

Noctis waved him back to bed with the floppy end of his sleeve, scooting to the corner where the mattress met the wall to make room for Nyx to reclaim his station as royal heater to the Crown Prince of Lucis while the rain berated the apartment from outside his window.

“It’s not really morning, is it?” Noctis yawned, shaking the sleeves of Nyx’s sweater down his arms so he could accept the steaming cup of coffee.

“You wouldn’t think so, looking at it now,” Nyx said, settling so Noctis could shimmy himself into the small crook where Nyx’s arm met his shoulder like it was his very own burrow against the raindrops.

The city was dark above them, the washed out colors of the immigrant district contained within the four sides of the window over his bed. The rain buffeted in a steady, heavy rhythm against the concrete, the metallic _rat-tat_ of the drops colliding with the shop awnings across the street like a metronome, keeping time with the shower.

“Sun’s not out,” Noctis slurred. “Sleep time still.”

In spite of his own logic, Noctis kept his mug of coffee curled close to his chest, like he was determined to wake himself up with it, regardless of how badly he wanted to go back to sleep. Nyx would gladly let him if he really wanted to. He had the day off, nowhere else he needed to be with the skies purging themselves in such lazy floods.

“Tired?” Nyx asked, turning tentative half-circles against Noct’s elbow where his hand fell around him.

Noctis nodded against his chest, the tickle of his hair rubbing against the spider-web scar there. Noctis took a deliberate sip of his coffee then, reminded of his restless night and why he might want to stay awake after all.

Often before the storms hit – and often, not even then – Noctis was tense in his sleep, tossing and turning and bruising Nyx’s hip where his knees collided in his midnight thrashings. Once the thunderclouds lightened from their black bellowing and the rain steadied into an even hum, he settled, coiled around Nyx’s arm in a mess of limbs and hair and pilfered clothes.

“Why are you still up so early on your day off?” Noctis mumbled, a question often asked and answered, but no less uncomprehending, every time. Noctis peered up at him through his hair, blue eyes a dull glint of concern. “You’re not tired?”

Nyx knew what he was asking, just as much as Noct had known when he’d been asked. The prince was not the only one plagued by nightmares, though Nyx’s often came after the storm, rather than before it. The rips and tears of the thunder and lightning shouted over the banshee shrieks in his head, allowing him a temperate silence he’d lost long ago. Once the storm passed though, and the muted cantering of the raindrops on the rooftop pitched lower than noises in his nightmares, sleep was lost to him.

Of course he was tired. But the only rest he could find was in being awake, pacing the apartment before dawn, making coffee to sate the demons scattered about in his head, and watching Noct sleep until the light leaked in from behind the clouds.

His failure to answer Noctis woke him up quicker than a coffee cup could. His eyes sharpened, but just blunt enough for Nyx not to feel the edge of it. Noct shifted, careful not to send hot coffee spilling across the sheets dappled with coffee stains past. He set his chin upon Nyx’s shoulder so he could look up at him, hand resting on his chest to trace the scars there. He didn’t need to ask in words. It was always in his eyes, an invitation ever-open.

_Are you okay?_

Nyx managed a smile and reached up to weave his fingers through Noct’s, resting their entwined hands at the epicenter of the scars. Like a storm across his own skin, the raised marks bolted across his chest from a singular point. Some days, he could still feel that fuzzy charge of electricity in his blood from the wicked anchor that had pierced him, sapping the sacred connection to the King’s pool of magic that he never expected could be stolen.

“I had a dream about this,” he confessed, looking down at the unmoving electricity, frozen atop his skin.

“You’ve never said how you got it,” Noctis said, softly.

He didn’t pry. He never asked Nyx more than he was willing to tell, regardless of how his curiosity showed in his eyes, around every corner in the training field’s changing room, out of the shower after a hard spar, around the apartment after a night of love-making, where sweeter secrets were said into skin under the covers.

“Guess I was the guinea pig for the Nifs’ new toys,” Nyx chuckled, though it hadn’t been even remotely funny at the time.

Libs said he nearly died – that for a minute or two, the medics said he really had. Of course, Nyx didn’t remember dying. He remembered the shock of a hook through the chest in the dark lanes of an enemy airship, dragging him from the belly of the docked machine before his team could commandeer it for the Crownsguard’s dissection. He remembered how terrible the feeling of tainted electricity had been when the MT had activated the charge. He remembered how all the movement in his limbs was torn from his body, every function in his brain stalling and shutting down before he could hook his kukri around to cut the cable.

“What was the dream about?” Noctis asked, careful and quiet beneath the purr of the rain.

Nyx pursed his lips together and stared out the window. He didn’t want to remember it. How the hum of the rain had vanished into the buzz of the cable running through _Noctis_. How the fading yawn of the thunder had risen into Noct’s whine of agony.

“Not me,” he said, simply and honest.

Noctis didn’t press him any further about it. The aversion of Nyx’s gaze out the window told him everything he needed to know. They laid in silence for a while, listening to the rain and letting their nighttime tormentors drain into the dreary morning.

Then, Noctis asked, “Can you tell me another story about home?”

Nyx chuckled around the rim of his coffee cup, drawing on another gulp as he squeezed Noct nearer to his side. “I feel like I’ve told you all of them by now. You sure you’re not sick of me whining like an old man about the good ol’ days?”

“Never,” Noctis snorted in drowsy laughter.

“You indulge me too much, you know that, right?”

“I’m sure your colleagues would thank me. Get you all talked out this early in the morning and maybe you’ll be quieter on the clock.”

Nyx laughed out right at that, and Noctis smiled and snuggled even closer – not that there was any space left to fill. Nyx hummed in thought, carding fingers through Noct’s hair to even out the tangles. He closed his eyes and thought of home, and didn’t even realize he’d started verbalizing the memories he saw playing against his closed eyelids until he heard Noct’s muttered encouragements to keep going in between the pauses.

He told him about the canyon. Though he was sure he’d told him about it many times before, Noctis interjected questions as if he hadn’t heard the story a single time. Nyx told him about flying before he’d ever learned how to warp, about wielding fire in the food he and Libs brought with them when they ventured out before he ever learned how to use magic.

He told Noctis that he was falling asleep and that he should stop him so he could rest, to which Noct shook his head, heavy with the catching dregs of slumber, and mumbled, “Keep talking.”

Talking was like the thunderstorms. It was just enough noise to stop hearing the hisses of fear and trauma in his thoughts. The rain eventually lulled Noctis back to sleep, and when Nyx had exhausted himself talking about the stories he’d wanted to hear, it was the sound of Noct’s breaths that eventually helped him fall asleep beside him.

The silence of their dreamless sleeps soothed the scars traced between them, twin mugs of coffee going cold on the table beside them until the rainclouds parted to morning.


End file.
